Example One: the NRA's Sandy Hook massacre response, so successful by this week's two-year anniversary date, "there are now places where you can carry your AR-15 to the pharmacy to pick up your anti-anxiety meds."
Example Two: CIA actions and public willingness to accept torture. Of this, Pierce writes, "What we did was justified, but don't tell us about it because it will disturb the Exceptionalist diorama that we have built in our heads."
Which leads Pierce to conclude—
If the public has demonstrated its willingness to eat the omelettes without learning how the eggs were broken on these two obvious public policy disasters -- and that is being incredibly kind to their architects -- why wouldn't they Support Their Local Police in these times of trouble and woe and obvious danger? The unions have every right to feel confident that the public, eventually, and not necessarily slowly, will come around to their way of thinking. One of the chief ingredients that are crucial to the narcotic concoction that is American Exceptionalism is the idea that everything the country does is for the purposes of moving it toward...something, some hazy Utopia in The West where all will be forgiven and all will be justified by their faith in the fable alone. Therefore, any of the episodes of the country's basic brutality-- slavery, the genocide of the Indians, Jim Crow, the bloody reaction to the Civil Rights movement, the killing of a 12-year old boy by a cop who wouldn't have passed the competency test to be a crossing guard -- are seen as hurdles to be overcome on the golden road to some vague land of redemption, and not as demonstrations of a fundamental moral deficiency in the entire experiment that desperately needs to be examined before the country can move forward at all. We love the Teachable Moments as long as we don't have to learn anything from them.
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